Steve Jobs was famously obsessive about fonts, and spent a huge amount of time ensuring they were just perfect to a level of detail that the average person just wouldn’t care about.
This is probably why you weren’t officially allowed to really mess with the iPhone system font for most of its existence.
Is that just another unreasonable restriction from Apple?
Well, having seen the system font choices some Android users make, we might have to concede that old Steve had a point.
I turned off these Gboard features, and typing feels infinitely better now
Gboard is better without these features
Your phone shouldn’t look like a ransom note
Send us $100 or we will switch to Comic Sans
Android is strongly associated with individuality and total customization. It can be as simple as changing the wallpaper, icons, and fonts, to total custom firmware overhauls with interfaces that you can’t even recognize as Android.
Funnily enough, there are fans at the other extreme too, who yearn for the mythical “stock Android” experience and see any manufacturer customizations as “bloat.”
No one should be against giving people the ability to customize their own devices, but if you’re going to walk boldly in public wearing Crocs and sporting a mullet, you need to expect that someone will mention this odd fashion choice.
It either means someone’s trying to make an impression, or they really are completely oblivious,
Wacky fonts sabotage usability
Social media is hard enough to understand already.
What’s ugly to one person can be the coolest thing ever to the next. You’ve heard that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and, ultimately, aesthetics are subjective.
However, that doesn’t mean a font can’t have objective problems. Ones that the average person might not even consider.
Highly-decorative fonts don’t scale well, in particular, when it comes to being legible at smaller sizes or for efficient spacing at large sizes.
In some fonts, certain characters (such as “I” and “l”) are harder to tell apart, and if apps use your system font, which is now something weird, it can break that app’s intended layout.
It’s worse for older eyes (and busy brains)
We have enough to think about
Default fonts are carefully chosen to be both attractive and legible to as many people in as many contexts as possible. Maybe that’s why they end up being bland, but that’s in the name of usability.
Companies like Google spend big money developing fonts like Roboto Serif in the hope that it will look great and be legible in all situations while still letting us tweak it.
The harder fonts are to parse, the more load is put on your brain, and the more vision issues you have, the more effort you need to expend more time and energy to read what’s on-screen.
Basically, having a hard-to-read font makes you more tired, slows you down, and increases the odds you’ll make a mistake when reading or writing text.
Personalization doesn’t have to mean pain
If you’re going to be different, have some style
If you really want to change the font on Android, there’s nothing wrong with that, but put some thought into how your personalization will impact the usability of your device.
People make all sorts of outlandish customizations to their possessions all the time that destroy usability.
Sometimes it’s not about practicality at all, but about subcultures or being an iconoclast, regardless of the pain you have to go through. If that’s you or someone you know, then they are doing exactly what they want with open eyes.
It’s parents and grandparents who pick a cool-looking font without a second thought and need a little guidance. Because now their phone experience sucks, and they might not really grasp why, because most people are not into UX design, nor should they be.
There are plenty of attractive fonts that are more practical, or sometimes that out-there font is only really a problem because it also needs a size adjustment, or it shouldn’t be in bold.
Just because changing fonts is easy doesn’t mean it’s a fire-and-forget solution.
How to stage a friendly font intervention
Do it because you care
The next time your mom hands you her Android phone to figure out why she’s getting a bunch of malware popups, and you notice that she’s decided Wingdings are the best expression of her personality, it’s time to have the talk.
We’ve given you more than enough reasonable arguments that you can use to convince someone in your family or friend’s circle to switch to something less eye-searing, but we aren’t here to judge.
Maybe it’s good to ask questions like “Why did you pick this font?” or “Don’t you have a hard time reading this?” as an icebreaker.
Don’t assume they have no reason or thinking behind the choice, but it’s a great opportunity to talk about usability and what makes a font suitable for limited use compared to making your entire system use it.
Just don’t start evangelizing stock Android. We don’t want to swing too far back in the other direction. Then you might as well suggest they switch over to an iPhone.
